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At
the Agile Coaching DC
meetup
tonight, about 50 people participated in my “Behavior-Driven
Development for Everyone” exercise.
The abstract:

Problems are better solved when you’re better involved. That’s how you
make your living, and that’s what BDD is all about. We’ll work together
to solve a problem in a way we can all understand and trust, expressing
what we want in plain English and automating our tests with a tool
called Cucumber. Don’t worry, you won’t be put on the spot at the
keyboard — I’ll handle all the coding!

What we did

My goal was to illustrate two things:

Cucumber the tool: side-by-side-by-side, how the three ingredients —
the human-readable Gherkin spec, the programmer-readable step
definitions that animate the spec, and the code being developed to
meet the spec — are connected, or might fail to be, and how they
must evolve together.

BDD the practice: side-by-side-by-side, how the Three Amigos —
Product Owners, Testers, and Developers — are connected, or might
fail to be, and how they can collaborate via shared language (and
optionally a tool like Cucumber).

To that end, after reviewing a few slides, I live-coded the first
few bits of Gherkin, step definitions, and application code, using
Cucumber in Perl.
Then we split into a few groups to slice and sequence the remaining
scenarios that add up to a properly scored game of bowling, and got back
together at the end to compare results. Our findings are in the slides.

Read more

Learn more

What would BDD look like in your context? Need help getting started? Get
in touch! I’d love to work with you (especially in the New York metro
area or remotely) or refer you to an expert hands-on instructor near you.